Author: Eric D. Schabell

Eric is Red Hat’s Global Technology Evangelist Director, and is renowned in the development community as a speaker, lecturer, author and baseball expert. Having worked within software development since 1998 his current role within the Solutions group means that he is central to defining, managing and bringing to market integrated cloud solutions that showcase the full power of Red Hat’s comprehensive portfolio of established and emergent technologies. It also allows him to share his deep expertise of Red Hat’s open source technologies and cloud computing. Follow on http://schabell.org.

Do you want a step-by-step introduction to setting up JBoss BPM Suite, then coverage of practical and important topics like data modeling, designing business rules and processes, detailed real world examples, and tips for testing?

For the last few years I’ve been working on putting years of working with JBoss BPM Suite, community projects Drools and jBPM together in one easy to understand book.

In 2017, Red Hat put the first chapter online for free and literally thousands downloaded it starting their journey on the road to delivering process driven application with JBoss BPM Suite. Many of you have reached out over the years to ask about the completion of this book and where you can get it.

The good news isthat the book is available and Red Hat’s providing ebook downloads for free!

In our journey to transform our ways of working, our focus on our customers wishes and our plans to pivot to a digital business there is always a need for process improvement.

While the transformation to a digital business can encompass many aspects that are new to your organization, there are always existing investments in technologies and processes that need to be evaluated.

Some can be modernized and migrated on to the new infrastructure that will support the digital business and others end up remaining in place as legacy systems of record.

One thing is for sure, evaluating existing business processes and looking to improve their effectiveness is going to be a necessary step. With that in mind, here are three ways to effectively prepare for process improvements in your digital journey.

1. Effective BPM theory

The first step in any journey is to plan effectively and gather as much information from the experts as you can. For this step you have many options, but the following example previews the open technology and tooling that will ensure you are ready to tackle process improvements.

2. Inventory existing processes

Identifying the list of existing processes in a business, both automated and non-automated processes will be the next step on the journey.

Businesses have processes in place that might be automated in some form, but showing signs of age or lack of effective execution. Others might have partial automation and exhibit a need for further automation at the time of evaluation. Finally, there can potentially be processes in your business that are crying out for automation and are hindering other processes with their lack of automation.

Collect all this information for evaluation without regard for size, level of automation or making decisions on priority for the next step.

3. Short list processes

Now that you’re able to browse all processes in your organization, identifying the short list where quick wins on process improvements is critical to the project’s success.

Everyone wants to see gains and building momentum with processes that can be improved both quickly and effectively builds confidence. Identify processes that have impact, are visible and can be effectively improved without having major impacts to the existing architecture or business process owner perceptions. This will be different for every organization, but crucial to building success and ensuring a smoother transition on your digital journey.

Armed with these three guidelines you’re ready to effectively prepare for process improvements in your digital journey.

This year I was part of the process of selecting the labs you are going to experience at Red Hat Summit and wanted to share here some to help you plan your JBoss labs experience. These labs are for you to spend time with the experts who will teach you hands-on how to get the most out of your JBoss middleware products.

Each lab is a 2-hour session, so planning is essential to getting the most out of your days at Red Hat Summit.

As you might be struggling to find and plan your sessions together with some lab time, here is an overview of the labs you can find in the session catalog for exact room and times. Each entry includes the lab number, title, abstract, instructors and is linked to the session catalog entry:

The way the MEAP works is that every month or so Manning puts a new chapter online. Lost a bit in the holidays, but chapter 6 was made available and those already in the MEAP will have had access to start reading the chapter.

As mentioned when chapter 5 released, I expected to split out the chapter into a second as the content covered was too expansive. I divided it into the simpler basics of creating business logic with rules and moved on into more advanced topics.

Enjoy topics such as modeling complex domains with domain specific languages (DSL), capturing complex logic in decision tables and leveraging DSLs in your guided rules. All this takes you a step closer to effectively implementing your business logic with JBoss BPM.

To give you an idea of what’s available so far:

You can read this excerpt online before you decide, but I look forward to hearing from you on the content and stay tuned for more.

The way the MEAP works is that every month or so Manning puts a new chapter online. As of this week chapter 5 is available and those already in the MEAP will have access to start reading the chapter.

This is a large chapter and it is one of the harder topics to confine to a single chapter. I do expect to split this chapter up in the future so that you have the basics and then more advanced topics regarding learning to effectively implement your business logic with JBoss BPM.

To give you an idea of what’s available so far:

You can read this excerpt online before you decide, but I look forward to hearing from you on the content and stay tuned for more.

If you are evaluating, exploring or just plain interested in learning more about Business Process Management (BPM), then read onwards as this is what you have been waiting for.

While there are quite a few resources online, often they are focused either on community project code that is constantly changing or disjointed in such a manner that it is very difficult for you to find a coherent learning path.

No more.

Just a few months back, in June, the early access program for Effective Business Process Management with JBoss BPM kicked off. This book is focused on a coherent path of learning to get you started with BPM and it focuses on JBoss BPM Suite as the Open Source BPM solution of choice.

Like this:

This tips & tricks comes to you after I have been asked the following repeatedly over the last few weeks by users of the JBoss BRMS demos:

“How can I import the projects associated with the various JBoss BRMS demo projects into my own existing installation?”

What this means is that users want to have an example project in their personal installation of the product without using the projects installation process. This is certainly possible but not totally obvious to everyone.

Below I will walk you through how the various example projects for JBoss BRMS are setup, how the actual rules projects are loaded into JBoss BRMS when you set them up and why. After this I will show you how to extract any of the available rules projects for importing in to any previously installed JBoss BRMS server.

Figure 1: In JBoss BRMS open the Administration

perspective with menu options, Authoring -> Administration.

Background on how it works

The normal installation of a JBoss BRMS demo project that I have provided uses a template. This template ensures that the process is always the same; download, unzip, add products and run the installation script. After doing this, you are done, just fire up the JBoss BRMS for the adjusted experience where you open up the Authoring perspective to a pretty process designer with the demo project displayed for you to kick off a demo run.

These projects have a demo template that provides some consistency and you can read about how it works in a previous article. For the initial installation run of any of these demo projects, a folder is copied from support/brms-demo-niogit to the installation at the location target/jboss-eap-{version}/bin/.niogit.

Figure 2: To import a new project, open the Clone repository

from the menu Repositories. This will allow you to bring

in any rules project to your JBoss BRMS.

This folder contains all of the project and system Git repositories that are formatted for the version of the project you have downloaded. By installing this directory or complete repository, when JBoss BRMS starts up the first time, it will pick up the state I left it in when designing the experience around you using this demo project.

Get your hands on a specific rules project

The problem I want to help you with in this article is to show you how to extract only the rules project from one of these examples and import this into your own installation of JBoss BRMS.

Figure 3: Cloning a repository is how you import an

existing project, which requires the

information shown.

The following list is the order you do the tasks, after which I will explain each one:

Explore the new project in the Authoring perspective: Authoring -> Project Authoring

I am going to assume you can find a JBoss BRMS demo project of your liking from the link provided in step 1 and download or clone to your local machine.

I will be using the JBoss BRMS Cool Store Demo as the example project you want to import into your current JBoss BRMS installation instead of leveraging the standalone demo project.

In your current installation where you are logged in, open the Administration perspective as shown in figure 1 by menu options Authoring -> Administration. This allows you to start importing any existing rules project. We will be importing the Cool Store rules project by using the feature to clone existing projects found in menu options, Repositories -> Clone repository as shown in figure 2.

Figure 4: Once the project has been imported (cloned), you
will receive this message in a pop-up.

This will produce a pop-up that asks for some information about the project to be imported, which you can fill in as listed below and shown in figure 3:

Repository Name: retail

Organizational Unit: Demos (select whatever org you want to use from your system)

The most interesting bit here is the Git URL, which is normally something hosted online, but this project we want to import is positioned locally in our filesystem, so we use a file based URL to point to it. Click on Clone button to import the project and you should see a pop-up that looks like figure 4 stating that you have successfully imported your project.

Now you can explore the new imported project in your authoring perspective and proceed as you desire with this project as shown in figure 5. This will work for any project I have put together for the field that is based on the standard template I use.

I hope this tips & tricks helps you to explore and enjoy as many of the existing rules examples offered in the current collection of demo projects.

This tips & tricks comes to you after I have been asked the following repeatedly over the last few weeks by users of the JBoss BPM Suite demos:

“How can I import the projects associated with the various JBoss BPM Suite demo projects into my own existing installation?”

What this means is that users want to have an example project in their personal installation of the product without using the projects installation process. This is certainly possible but not totally obvious to everyone.

When we go to the Red Hat Summit this year in San Francisco, we have planned to attend sessions, labs, evening events and even maybe a few good seafood restaurants. Little did you know that there is a gem you might want to fit into your busy schedule, as it is a chance to meet some of the rock stars that are backing the Red Hat Open Innovation Labs.

There will be a series of sessions hosted by experts to showcase use of Red Hat technologies and demonstrate the best practices with interactive white boarding. That is a personal touch session where you can interact with the storytellers and will be taking place in the West Lobby of M0scone Center on level 2.

When your background is application development, you have spent many hours, days and years perfecting your craft. You have not only mastered languages and concepts, you have made it a point to learn to make good architectural decisions when pulling together the applications you develop.

The problem is, we tend to ignore the stack we are working on as much as we can. Well it’s time that we as application developers broadened our horizons a bit, expanding our understanding of the stack we work on with the introduction of Cloud, Platform As A Service (PaaS) and containers to our toolboxes.

Our tour of your Cloud stack continues, from our previous article in this series where we talked about our PaaS interface for our application delivery, onto how open interoperability is critical to the success of our Cloud stack.